


Rough Landing

by Tipsy_Kitty



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 07:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3126872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tipsy_Kitty/pseuds/Tipsy_Kitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fuck, Dean hates flying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rough Landing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinnerforhire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinnerforhire/gifts).



He hates actually being Dean Winchester when he's on a hunt, but he's not stupid enough to fuck around with the TSA, not these days. He flashes his real ID at the ticket counter and counts out $652 of his hard-won poker earnings. The agent raises an eyebrow at the pile of crumpled bills, and Dean smirks at him while he waits for his boarding pass to print.

Fuck, Dean hates flying. Squashed next to some civvie in a business suit is no way to travel, not when he could be eating up the miles of road listening to his Zeppelin tapes and drumming on the steering wheel.

But he was still finishing up a case in a Louisiana bayou when Pastor Jim had called to tell him that something bad was targeting kids in a backwater town an hour out of Seattle. Even though Dean was a fucking amazing driver (if he said so himself—and he did, to anyone who’d listen), even he could not make a 2,700 mile drive in 12 hours.

“Flight 502 to Seattle via Houston, terminal A, enjoy your flight,” the agent says, bored, and Dean nods as he grabs the boarding pass and hands over his duffel for baggage check, empty of all its usual weapons save a rosary, a vial of holy water, and some blessed bamboo knitting needles. 

Fuck, Dean hates flying.

 

The sky is a cloudless, piercing pale blue, the early morning sun hovering small and cold over the horizon. Dean takes a deep, steadying breath as he crosses the tarmac and climbs the metal staircase to the plane’s door, letting his lungs fill with the last fresh air they’ll taste for awhile. 

He finds his seat, wedges himself against the window, smiles fast and tight at the man in an ill-fitting undertaker’s suit who settles in next to him. He watches as suitcases are loaded into the plane’s underbelly, most of them black with the occasional splash of red or blue or green, and tries not to think about why he’s flying across the country to take this hunt when his Dad is supposed to be out in California already. It’s like a sore spot in his mouth that his tongue won’t leave alone. Did Jim try to contact Dad first? Does he know where his dad is?

Did _Dad_ relay the message to Dean through Jim? He’d stopped taking Dean’s calls more than a week ago, and the anxiety has become a constant buzzing in his belly—not quite fear, not yet, but growing steadily every day. The worry that something’s happened to Dad—that he’s mixed up in something that could finally get the old bastard killed—is bad, but the thought that his dad is _consciously_ cutting Dean loose from his life, finally ridding himself of Dean, is so much worse.

That last possibility hurts too much to consider for very long, so he stuffs his mounting fears back down his throat and waits impatiently for takeoff, when he can start downing bourbon & O.J. until his brain shuts off for a few blissful hours.

The plane begins its slow taxi down the runway, gradually picking up speed, and Dean turns away from the window and tilts his head back, willing his body to calm. It’s not like he’s _scared_ of flying or anything, he’s a fucking Winchester, after all. He knows he has a much greater chance of being knocked off by some fugly critter than dying in a plane crash. 

Still.

Still, he’d like to get this damned flight over with. Maybe after he’s taken care of whatever bogeyman is picking off defenseless little kids on the West Coast, maybe he’ll hitch a ride down to Palo Alto and just check in on Sam. Make sure he knows what at least one Winchester is up to while his dad plays detective and ignores Dean’s texts. Make sure at least one member of his tiny family is still whole. Still safe.

 

The plane is barely five minutes into its climb towards flight altitude when it begins making an unpleasantly rapid descent. 

There’s nothing to indicate something’s gone wrong; no fire or engine explosion, no sudden storm or gremlin on the wing. Just the lurching tilt of the plane and the ground rushing up to meet it.

Dean clenches his fists and closes his eyes, pissed. Of fucking _course_ his plane is going to go down. _Lucky_ is not something Dean’s ever considered himself. Even with women and cards and pool, his ‘luck’ is really a carefully honed set of skills meant to just _look_ effortless.

The pilot mumbles something over the intercom that Dean’s brain can’t quite translate into words. He pictures Peter Graves sitting in the cockpit talking about Turkish prisons and laughs a little crazily, and then they’re on the ground, the plane bumping roughly across a cow pasture, Dean’s body jolting against the lap belt as purses and briefcases and oxygen masks bounce all around the frightened passengers.

Once the plane has shuddered to a stop, it’s eerily quiet for about three seconds before everybody starts talking and moving at once, cell phones beeping to life, seat belts being yanked off, children (and not a few adults) crying. Dean stays seated, perfectly still, as a strange calm settles over him that feels like peace but is probably shock. 

He sits as the pilot makes more announcements that Dean still can’t parse recognizably, as the passengers (…survivors…) around him call their loved ones or cancel meetings, as flight attendants try to clear the aisles so people can begin to exit through the emergency doors. He sits until he’s the last one left on the plane, and then he skids down the stiff rubber slide onto the field below, which is not nearly as fun as it looks on TV. 

He watches as three ambulances and a fire truck scream down Blackwater Road and pull onto the field, followed by a convoy of airport shuttles, and finally two news vans. He watches as a triage is set up in the middle of the pasture, though Dean doesn’t think anybody was seriously injured. He sees one guy limping and a few people with scrapes and cuts on their faces, but nothing catastrophic.

Harried airline officials appear, giving out handfuls of vouchers, but Dean waves his away. He will not be needing discount airfare, _ever_ , because he’s never getting on a goddamn plane again.

They won’t let anyone board the shuttles until they’ve been checked over by the paramedics first, so Dean picks up his duffel from a pile of bags spilling out of the cargo hold, hoists it over one shoulder, and starts walking.

He hears someone very far away calling him Sir and telling him he needs to wait until he’s received medical attention, but Dean just keeps walking. 

Two miles down the road, he remembers to turn on his phone and shoot Jim a text— _send someone else_ —and then he turns it off again and stuffs the phone in his jacket.

Four miles down the road, an ancient Chevy pick-up slows down next to him, and Dean hops inside. 

The farmer, Eli, or maybe Elijah, has dark brown skin and bright white hair and clenches an unlit cigarette between two fingers but never lights it. He drops Dean off at the airport’s long-term parking and Dean thanks him, so grateful to see his Baby waiting for him with a tank full of gas and a shoebox full of cassettes that he might want to cry a little.

He doesn’t, of course. He’s a fucking Winchester.

It takes him three days to get there, cutting across Texas and the southwest tip of New Mexico, stopping just past Tucson one night to sleep in an actual bed instead of dozing at rest stops. 

He doesn’t dream about flying, or falling, or crashing. 

He doesn’t. 

It’s after midnight when he pulls into Palo Alto, closer to one when he finally finds the white stucco apartment building where his brother lives.

 

He never finds out what happened, never even tries. It’s not the kind of incident that makes major headlines, probably just a few inches in a local paper and a brief mention on the twelve o’clock news. Although he wonders sometimes—was the pilot drunk? Did a goose fly through one of the propellers? –he finds it easy to ignore the questions almost as soon as his mind supplies them. He generally has more immediate threats to deal with, something trying to kill him or Sammy almost daily, and he finds that it’s not so hard to leave Flight 502 tucked away in the darker recesses of his mind.

He’d thought about telling Sam what happened that first weekend, but the words wouldn’t come. And then Sam’s girlfriend was dead and the window for saying casually, “Hey, I almost died but not really,” had been closed forever.

He tells himself that driving from Louisiana to California saved his brother’s life, instead of leading some evil sonofabitch by the nose right to his brother’s front door.

Some days he even believes it.

He wonders though, in the brief instances when he allows himself to wonder such things, if he should have waited for the shock to clear and his mind to come back online before he decided to pull Sam out of his life and go searching for their father.

And he wonders a few months later if he was supposed to go down with Flight 424 out of Indianapolis, if he was supposed to die while Sam and Jess were having engagement parties and making wedding plans. If there was some sort of card dealt by fate waiting for him that said DEAN WINCHESTER – PLANE CRASH, but the date had been fuzzy and hard to read, and so he’d escaped.

But he hadn’t waited. And when Eli-or-Elijah had picked Dean up on that road four miles west of the crash site, had asked Dean where he was headed, Dean knew where he wanted to go.

“Home,” Dean had said, looking out his window. “I’m going home.”


End file.
